Intermediate Editor Tasks
There are a whole range of things that need work here and there. Someone with a little wiki experience can help in tons of ways. Find a way that fires you up and jump in! We've attempted to make this list in somewhat an order of difficultly (or knowledge of wiki-editing) so you can gauge your abilities as you work your way down the list. This is not in any way an inclusive list - if you see something else that needs to be done, just do it! Thanks for your help! Discussion pages If you have a question on a page, or want a change that you're not quite sure how to do, put it on a discussion page. There are multiple people who watch the recent changes page (more on that later), so someone is likely to see the note pretty quickly. When you write a note or question, be sure to sign your post so we easily know who wrote it (and when!). To do this, add --~~~~ to the end of your post. You may be able to click on the "signature" button on the top of the editor as well. Signing a post shows up like this after you save it: --Degrassi 21:40, 18 January 2007 (EST) Recent Changes This is a great page to watch. It will show you changes that anyone makes. You can learn a lot by watching how other people edit pages. You'll also see pages that have discussion on them so you can more easily participate in those. The link is on the left, or you can click on . Disambiguation pages Some items have multiple pages associated with them (an ability, a spell with the same name, etc). The main item will have a page called a disambiguation page to help a user sort out what page he or she really meant. See Invisibility for instance. This is fine when a user is searching, but items that link here probably already mean to go to a specific version. The Disambiguations special page (click on "Special pages" on the left, or from here you can just jump to the page. This is a list of pages that are linking to a disambiguation page and probably should link to a specific version. It even says what link is the problem. If I click on Trickery Domain I currently see that it links to Invisibility. I can look at the page and easily know that they mean Invisibility (Spell) since they're referring to the domain spell. If I open the page, I see Invisibility. This should be changed to Invisibility (Spell). This will link to the spell Invisibility directly. You'll notice a pipe character (|) that was added after the (Spell) note. This will hide the "(Spell)" part so it still shows up to the user as just Invisibility. Look at the Trickery Domain to see how this turned out. Derivative Monsters Monsters that don't advance in class levels often still have advancement options. We'd like to have some advanced monsters available at certain thresholds as samples for folks. To help with this, first review the Improving Monsters page. This talks about the mechanics of how to advance monsters. Then, browse the monsters and find one that doesn't already have advanced samples. Let's use the Gorgon as an example. If you look at the advancement, it's shown as: Advancement: 9-15 HD (Large); 16-24 HD (Huge) So, the standard Gorgon is large at 9 HD, but once it advances to 16 HD, it becomes huge. We'd like a sample Huge Gorgon, then. An easy way to do this would be to print the Gorgon out and look at what HD it advances at (16 for the Gorgon). Follow the Improving Monsters guidelines to create what could be seen as an "average/typical" 16 HD Gorgon using those guidelines. Then, click edit on the Gorgon page, and copy and paste the text into a new file called "Gorgon, Huge". With the monster name first, they'll sort together nicely. Make changes to the file to match the changes you made on the printout to bring up the Gorgon to be a huge 16 HD monster. Another thing to change will be to take the template: and change it to: since you're creating new Open Content and not copying something from the SRD. Another nice touch is to add a "see also:" tag at the bottom. See also : Gorgon, Gorgon, Huge Copy this text into the original Gorgon file as well at the bottom so they can be accessed from one another. If you're creating many variants for some reason, it may be easier to create a monster group instead of having a long huge "see also" line. See Monster Groups for more info. Derivative Monsters, advanced Another derivative monster we want follow similar rules as with the advanced monsters above, but look at the monster's organization stat. For this example, we'll use Merfolk, (1st-Level Warrior). If you look at the organization stat, it says: Organization: Company (2-4), patrol (11-20 plus 2 3rd-level lieutenants and 1 leader of 3rd-6th level), or band (30-60 plus 1 3rd-level sergeant per 20 adults, 5 5th-level lieutenants, 3 7th-level captains, and 10 porpoises) Unfortunately, we don't have any good samples for sergents, lieutenants, etc. The goal here is to make a simple, average, samples for these. Using class advacement rules, make a typical seeming sergent and similar for these and create new monsters (see the above section for details) for: *Merfolk, Sergent (3rd-level Figher) *Merfolk, Lieutenant (3rd-level Warrior) *Merfolk, Captain (7th-level Fighter) Or whatever levels and classes make sense for the monster. Because merfolk's favored class is Bard, it may be worth making the Sergent or one of the other samples a Bard instead. Use your judgement to make samples that work for DMs to work from. As you make the samples, name them as the examples above and go into the organization stats and link to the appropriate file. If you are only adding a couple of monsters, it's useful to add a See Also line (see the above section for samples). If the monster needs several additional monsters, consider making them a group instead.